Absalom, Absalom! is a notoriously difficult text.
Told from multiple, fragmentary, and contradictory perspectives through a highly convoluted stream-of-consciousness narration, the text resists any reading that establishes an ultimate meaning.
In that spirit, this supplement does not provide an over-arching explanation of the text, but uses different visualizations to understand different aspects of the text:
While each module is interconnected, they can also be read in isolation. Each module has its own heading, and navigating down unlocks more and more detail about each particular topic.
“money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family — incidentally of course, a wife”
The Digital Yoknapatawpha Digital Yoknapatawpha database contains every character who appears in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fictions.
Each character has a set of attribute information, including their race, class, gender, number, rank, and vitality.
With this information, we can model the composition of the entire character population. . . .
This model is a literary demography
One of the most salient pieces of demographic information in Absalom, Absalom! is race.
As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism. - Toni Morrison, Conversations
Racial segregation was a central feature of the American South before the Civil Rights Movement.
Faulkner was highly sensitive to how this artificial ‘color line’ structured social relations.
There are 194 unique characters in Absalom, Absalom!.
The overwhelming majority of these characters are White.
Simply counting the total number of characters in a text does not account for the number of times they occur in the text.
Statistically speaking, there is only one Moor in Shakespeare’s Othello, but as he appears in nearly every scene he is one of the most present characters.
We can weight for character presence by calculating how often they occur in an event.
Weighting by narrative presence actually underscores the presence of White characters more.
Meanwhile, the number of Mixed Ancestry characters increases.
But only because Black characters are less present.
The data suggest that while Absalom, Absalom! is concerned with the ‘color line’, it is decidedly from a White perspective.
Race and racial passing is only conceived in how it might trouble Whiteness and not how it might affect the Black community.
Charles Bon is more present in the text than all other Mixed Ancestry characters combined, but is simply another major character compared to the White characters.
Meanwhile, the most present Black characters are the unnamed enslaved characters.
It is clear from reading Absalom, Absalom! that the novel is about Charles Bon’s potential transgression across the ‘color line.’ The data reveal that the novel attends to this issue from a predominantly White perspective, and at the exclusion of all other non-white characters.
The various narrators only really care about racial passing if it threatens upper class white femininity.
As such, they naturalize racial difference, and also circumscribe the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and class.
In the highly fraught social circumstances of the pre-Civil Rights South, there is no way to separate race, class, gender, and sexuality.
“Maybe happen is never once”
Absalom, Absalom! resists summary. It is told from multiple, contradictory perspectives that each re-tell the same set of historical events: Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson and starts a family with Ellen Coldfield. He has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith. Judith falls in love with Henry’s friend from college Charles Bon. On the day Judith and Charles are supposed to marry, Henry kills him and disappears.
No one knows why,
but everyone has a theory.
Faulkner was once asked if any one of the characters has the “right view.”
In Absalom, Absalom! is any one of the people who talk about Sutpen have the right view, or is it more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them [getting it?] right? - May 8th, 1958 Faulkner at Virginia
His answer is telling…
Though the plot can be very confusing, it is clear from Faulkner’s notes that he had an underlying structure.
This underlying structure is sometimes referred to as the chronology or story.
Often used interchangeable, story and plot describe two different aspects of a narrative.
Plot - The order of events in which they are told to the reader.
Story - The order of events as they actually occur. This is also known as chronology.
Faulkner does not tell us the events in the order they occur (story). Instead, he reorganizes them into a non-linear order (plot).
We can see this distinction with his delayed revelations about Sutpen’s life.
Following the order of events as Quentin discovers them, we learn several important details about him out of order:
These should be re-sorted to tell the story.
Digital Yoknapatawpha has broken down the novel into 644 individual events.
An event is any time there is one or more characters at one location for a discrete period of time.
Each of the 644 events in the novel was also assigned a number that indicates its order in the plot and in the story/chronology.
We can take the plot and chronology data and put them on a chart to show the structure of the narrative.
Chronology is placed on the y-axis, and plot is placed on the x-axis.
Events that are chronologically earlier are lower down, while later events are higher up.
The plot chart shows the events as they are narrated to us, the story chart shows the order in which those events happen according to the chronology.
The plot structure chart for Absalom, Absalom! is incredibly complex, but the story mode reveals the basic structure: Four different narrators reconstruct the story of the Sutpen family many years after it has happened.
Each narrator actually follows a similar pattern. They start the narration in the “deep” past and work their way into the present. They often repeat similar details, but leave out crucial information.
The overlapping and disjointed versions of events capture Quentin’s lived experience of exploring the past. This is not a neat linear chronology told by one authority in a history book, but the collective story of multiple voices who have shaped and reshaped the events to match their version of the truth. The tellers cannot be separated from their tales. It forces us to wonder if any version of the past can ever be true, or if it is simply another story we tell ourselves.
The language in Absalom, Absalom! is very challenging.
Faulkner’s language constantly draws attention to itself.
The text reminds us that what is said cannot be separated from how it is said.
Sentences in Absalom, Absalom! are very long.
On average sentences are 50 words long.
The longest sentence is 1124 words! That’s a 3-4 page college paper.
Compared to other American Classics, Faulkner’s sentences are much, much longer.
Faulkner also concocts neologisms by combining words or adding a prefix to an existing word.
Perhaps the most unique feature of the text is Faulkner’s use of parentheses.
. . . There are 1278 total or 639 pairs. . . . These parentheses occur across the text, and also nest within each other three levels deep:
The nestings offer a network of digressions, modifications, amplifications, and dead ends. They represent the constant search for words to tell the story of the Sutpen family.
Appropriately, Quentin is burried deep within this nesting at level 4.
The complexity of Faulkner’s language forces the reader to consider the meaning of every word, in every long sentence, throughout the entire work. One cannot pull at any thread in the novel without loosening others. The past existed as a reality but it can only be represented in and through language.